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Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

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Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#31

Post by wbl »

chrisco255 wrote: post #27
Spooky23 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my city, they are dropping poles with 5G radios all over the place, as close as every 150-300 yards. It’s a land rush as the city cannot do anything to stop them, the poles get dropped in all sorts of awkward places. My understanding is that repeaters will be mounted on streetlights as well. Those radios aren’t for phones, they are for fixed wireless with antennas attached to your home. 5G is the cable killer, and…

What city is this and why can't the city do anything to stop them?

Because of federal preemption. Thankfully NIMBYs dont have the power to block communications improvements.

Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#32

Post by Spooky23 »

chrisco255 wrote: post #27
Spooky23 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my city, they are dropping poles with 5G radios all over the place, as close as every 150-300 yards. It’s a land rush as the city cannot do anything to stop them, the poles get dropped in all sorts of awkward places. My understanding is that repeaters will be mounted on streetlights as well. Those radios aren’t for phones, they are for fixed wireless with antennas attached to your home. 5G is the cable killer, and…

What city is this and why can't the city do anything to stop them?

Albany, NY.

The FCC is choosing to let the telecoms do whatever. It’s wasteful as they do things like block crosswalks with additional poles (to avoid renting from the electric utility) and place the poles in less attractive spots to reduce cost.

Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#33

Post by deathanatos »

johnm1019 wrote: post #3
nimish wrote: post #2

4G->5G is the equivalent to upgrading from gigabit to 10 gigabit ethernet yet everyone is treating it like some kind of insane technology. I have yet to see what exactly the hype is about.

I mostly agree but I want to nitpick. One of the areas I've heard should be improving with 5G is latency. On 4G we're talking O(10ms)? which on 5G, so says the marketing, should be O(1ms). If this is true, it will make a noticeable impact on the responsiveness of web driven apps (aka almost all apps) as well as video/audio chat liveness. Was this oversold to me (highly probable)?

> O(10ms)? […] so says the marketing

https://i.imgur.com/Dg4Jit5.png

That's my RTT ping to 8.8.8.8 as I travelled south on CalTrain from SF last week, on T~mobile's network.

Now, this is on an old phone that is only capable of HSPA+. However, the actual performance on the whole is still nowhere near any theoretical limits, or even limits of HSPA+.

Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#34

Post by xxpor »

leoh wrote: post #24

It's hard for me to understand why anyone is excited about 5G when most carriers aren't running full bandwidth 4G and have significant data caps. Although 5G may be fast in some markets, 5G on the whole just seems so pointless for consumers.

I'm more excited about the low power aspects than the high speeds.

Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#35

Post by freyir »

superkuh wrote: post #16

Great interview. At the start Dave kind of conflates 5G with millimeter wave 5G. The big difference between LTE networks and 5G networks is not the frequency ranges used, low band 5G is perfectly feasible. The big difference is the linear increase in information capacity per antenna in MIMO (multiple in multiple out, many send many receive antenna) verses the logarithmic increase per antenna with single antenna to si…

Just to be clear, MIMO is not a new feature in 5G. LTE has MIMO. Old Wi-Fi routers from 10 years ago had MIMO.

5G is upping the number of antennas per base station. Theoretically, this allows a linear increase in capacity, but linear scaling is not always achievable in practice.

The advantage of the higher frequency bands is the larger bandwidths available there. Conventional cellular bands typically have 5, 10, or 20 MHz bandwidth, sometimes 100 MHz. 5G's millimeter-wave bands support bandwidths up to 400 MHz. Information rate scales linearly with bandwidth. That said, there are many practical challenges to operating in the millimeter wave bands that might limit real-world performance.

Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#36

Post by bradknowles »

tzs wrote: post #20
post_break wrote: post #13

What I don't understand is if we get faster speeds, will we still see data buckets stay the same? I mean what's the point of a faster network if you're still capped at 2,5,10GB. And will qualcomm be the only game in town thanks to patents? My iPhone Xs feels like a bicycle in terms of data speed, while my Galaxy S8 is 2-3 times faster.

> I mean what's the point of a faster network if you're still capped at 2,5,10GB. For those (a large majority, I suspect) whose actual data usage is determine by factors that have little to do with the network, the point of a faster network is less time waiting. For example, I'm going to take about the same number of photos on my phone if I'm on a fast network as I will if I'm on a slow network. The fast network, tho…

You might start off taking the same number of photos, but as you can upload them much faster, you will start taking a lot more photos and the photos you take will be a lot larger.

The "if you build it, they will come" model applies to the creation and administration of most any constrained shared resource, whether that be roads or network bandwidth.

Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#37

Post by learc83 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #25
edoo wrote: post #18

If you've ever seriously played with wifi tech you very well know the higher the frequency the less penetration you get. In an indoor environment the difference between 800Mhz and 2.7Ghz can be astounding. 5G at 90Ghz is only going to work at certain line of sight distances. If you ever hear anyone talking about terahertz speeds you can almost be guaranteed that would be happening with very specifically located devic…

In my city, they are dropping poles with 5G radios all over the place, as close as every 150-300 yards. It’s a land rush as the city cannot do anything to stop them, the poles get dropped in all sorts of awkward places. My understanding is that repeaters will be mounted on streetlights as well. Those radios aren’t for phones, they are for fixed wireless with antennas attached to your home. 5G is the cable killer, and…

You still need to run fiber to the radios, and at a couple hundred yards apart, you're going to be running fiber down almost every single street. If the goal is fixed installation, you could have just ran it a few feet more directly to the house.

>and eventually the WiFi killer.

How is this going to work? The radios you're talking about are very high frequency, so they require line of site.

Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#38

Post by gruez »

jjoonathan wrote: post #26
leoh wrote: post #24

It's hard for me to understand why anyone is excited about 5G when most carriers aren't running full bandwidth 4G and have significant data caps. Although 5G may be fast in some markets, 5G on the whole just seems so pointless for consumers.

If new bandwidth / more bandwidth means new market entrants / more market entrants, it'll be great! I am sure that legions of lobbyists, politicians, and businessmen are working diligently as we speak to make sure that doesn't happen, but I want to believe.

>If new bandwidth / more bandwidth means new market entrants / more market entrants, it'll be great!

I doubt it. No one is going to build another network of cell towers just because new bandwidth is available

Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#39

Post by Gpetrium »

leoh wrote: post #24

It's hard for me to understand why anyone is excited about 5G when most carriers aren't running full bandwidth 4G and have significant data caps. Although 5G may be fast in some markets, 5G on the whole just seems so pointless for consumers.

I think the importance of 5G is not only tied to the consumer wanting a faster internet. It is tied to potential advances in remote surgeries, automated cars, Amazon drone packages, VR for medical purposes, potential improvements in security, cuts in operational cost by the carriers, etc.

It should be seeing similarly to advances in computer power throughout time, to some it makes little difference depending on the time horizon they are viewing, to others it allowed for machine learning to be used by a wider audience for example.

Re: Bell Labs Researcher Discusses the Realities of 5G

#40

Post by kalleboo »

wyldfire wrote: post #14
jessriedel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're mostly frustrated with the fact that the bars on your phone are lying to you, which is true but sorta separate.

The indicator "bars" usually show RSSI which doesn't necessarily map to throughput. Or rather, it's closer to a normalized metric for the (mobile+network infra)'s capability, but not an absolute metric like a speedometer.

And on some US carriers and devices the "bars" are often for a completely different technology than indicated https://forums.androidcentral.com/sprint/210510-bars-lie-lte...
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